Franklin
by socolormecurious
Summary: One November day in 1981, Alice and Frank reflect on a photograph. One shot- T for descriptions of violence.


**AUTHOR NOTES:** T for descriptions of violence. Just a one-shot I wrote ages ago. Reviews are the chocolate-covered strawberries of the fanfiction world. Frank, Alice, and the rest of the original Order all belong to JK Rowling. I just like to play dolls with them. Love, Lizzy

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><p>The flock of owls caught Frank s eye as he looked out, coffee cup in one hand with the newspaper tucked under the other. Its headline was more than enough cause for celebration. "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named Is Gone!" The sky suddenly seemed brighter, and wizards everywhere were taking to the street in robes and fashions Muggle eyes had never known. The Frank took a sip. He was glad it was not his job to keep the Muggles at bay. Work would be hectic enough. It did not matter that the Dark Lord was gone; his followers were still out there. Frank closed the curtain, shut the blinds. He was not in the mood to celebrate. He took another sip of coffee.<p>

Frank heard Alice come into the room from behind him, not because she was particularly loud, but because she hit the board that creaked. "The baby is back to sleep; he just wanted a bottle." She paused and chuckled lightly. "I wonder, however, if you know the difference between a bathrobe and the kind of robe you can wear to work. We don't want to be late, or else Moody will hand out all the good assignments." It wasn't true, of course. Moody loved the two Longbottoms; they had proven themselves time and time again.

Frank forced a smile. "You're right, darling." He turned around and put down the newspaper in his hand on the table. He was about to go on, but something on the end table caught his eye. There, next to the vase with the lilies and the comb from Alice's great-grandmother, the candy dish no one could remember acquiring and the watch Frank had taken off the previous night, was the photograph, waving at him with hope. Frank sighed as he picked up the frame and traced it. The frame and the photograph were simple, but they evoked so much emotion in Frank. He stopped in his tracks and put down his coffee. For once, Alice did not tell him to use a coaster. She sighed and put a hand on his shoulder.

They both stood there for what seemed like a year and a half, both remembering everything but neither saying a word.

No one knew at the time that Marlene would be gone before the next meeting. It was her idea to take the picture, and, as it was the first time anyone had seen her face light up since her brothers' deaths, the Order readily agreed. Only Alice and Lily protested. They both felt that, with the added ten pounds from the camera, their baby weights would be too much. There were concerns about the image that they would leave for posterity. Frank distinctly remembered whispering, You look beautiful in anything into Alice's ear, causing her to blush that vivid red color. Later, they would barely Apparate out of the meeting before she would scold at him. At that junction, however, all she did was swat him. After all, real punches left marks, and there was a camera in the room.

Marlene was now scurrying around, rearranging everyone. She used the fact that she was the shortest in the room by at least half a foot to her advantage; the disorder of the group would have made it impossible for anyone else to get through the mess. In what seemed like a second, she fixed Moody's hair, moved James's hand from Lily's backside to her waist, and tucked in Benjy's shirt. Then she clapped her hands, and started to speak in the commanding voice she had long ago cultivated in her pub. "Listen up, everyone! If this is going to take less than an hour, I am going to need your cooperation. Thank you."

Caradoc rolled his eyes and picked her up off of the chair she had used to become more visible. She sounded like he had knocked the air out of her as Caradoc flipped her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Caradoc was always a show off. On the Quidditch team, on a mission, at work, Caradoc loved dramatic movements. Marlene pounded feebly at his back, but there was no way he was going to be derailed, especially by a lightweight. "Marly," he said, "I think we all know how to get into a line."

Caradoc disappeared a few weeks after they went to Marlene's house. The Death Eaters had torched all of the McKinnon place; there had been no Dark Mark because the Muggle police had arrived too soon. Even with the clumsy attempts of the fire department, no one survived. All they could do was put out the fire. The whole place still smelled like smoke when Frank had arrived; he remembered coughing into his sleeve. Caradoc stood silently; Frank would never forget the look on his face. No one could blame him. For all his immaturity, Caradoc had been little Maureen's father. He had tried to be a good father, even though Marlene certainly did not need the help. When he went missing, everyone assumed that he was gone off for work. He wasn't one to explain where he had been; Marlene had always screamed at him for that. When the absence length, people said he was grieving, and he could not face the rest of the group. This, too, made sense; Caradoc hid all negative emotions. Yet when the weeks turned into months, no one could deny it any longer. Benjy, one of his few true friends in the group, had been the one to say it. Caradoc was never coming back again.

From the back, Gideon and Fabian Prewett chuckled at Caradoc's demonstration. They had gotten wilder since Molly had left the Order to take care of her brood, but the meetings had also gotten quieter. It seemed the Prewetts loved each other as much as they loved to fight. The boys would always argue that Molly should leave the group because of her children, and their older sister would counter that Gideon and Fabian were sure to get hurt. In the end, both sides had won. Molly did leave the Order, but she took Arthur- the twins' last minute ally- with her as well. There was an element lost at that meeting, and every meeting since Mrs. Weasley had left. She had always brought a sweet of some sort, and, as Alice never learned how to bake a proper pie, Frank appreciated it. The end of this traidition was not Molly's fault; she had given the cakes and cookies to Gideon and Fabian at every junction. It was only at the funeral that the Longbottoms and the rest learned this; the twins had apparently eaten all the treats on their way. It certainly explained why they were always late.

The Prewett wake was, by far, the happiest Frank had ever attended. It was fall, and the trees were dying, but no one focused on that. Besides the tale of the treats, there were many things to celebrate. The two had been natural entertainers while they were alive, and this had carried onto their deaths. Even the morbid fact that Gideon and Fabian had killed three Death Eaters while on their way out was turned into a positive thing. Count on the two of them to go out in style. Frank could just imagine their little contest over who could kill more; he wondered who had won. When the glasses were raised for a toast, only Emmeline and Molly looked like they had a tear in their eyes.

During the moment before the picture, however, Emmeline had been all smiles. Gideon tickled her, and she gave him a peck on the cheek while still keeping to her task of braiding Dorcas Meadowes's hair. The two women had been good for each other; the two former Slytherins had found a common bond despite the large age difference. Dorcas looked so young in Frank's memory; she was in the year behind James and the rest, but he seemed to make her just past puberty in his mind. Her long sleeves looked so out of place as well; it was the middle of June, yet she insisted on covering the tattoo on her left arm.

It was Dorcas that had recovered the first piece left from Benjy's death. She had never been allowed to know where everyone lived, for security's sake, but she had always felt the need to visit their houses upon their deaths. While the rest of the group would be destroying crucial evidence of the Order, she would comment on the little details that defined the deceased's temperament. She noticed the details the others had long forgotten, like Caradoc's bird cage from the parrot he had accidentally neglected, or the shot glasses from every place that the Prewetts had ever visited. That November, Benjy's house had looked normal, had it not been for the Dark Mark hovering over it and the lack of windows. The glass has shattered from the inside out; so had Benjy's body. After a whole day of searching, not much of the halfblood had been found. Dorcas had refused to give up, however. She kept claiming there had to be something there, and more than once, when someone followed her, they found her going to Benjy's house.

The deaths had always hit Dorcas the hardest. She had barely known Edgar Bones, and he had been among the voices protesting her involvement in the Order, but still she had to excuse herself from the ceremony. Eddie was Frank's age; they had been Quidditch rivals turned friends in the Aurors' office. They were very much alike- Edgar was a family man, and quiet, most of the time. He stood at the back during the bustle of the picture-taking, talking to Moody in hushed tones. Edgar was never one to waste time; even in the idle moments of a meeting, he was talking strategy. The quintessential workaholic, when he fell in the spring, it was because he got into the wrong people's books because he had found the right pieces of information. No one knew exactly who he had unmasked; he hadn't wanted to deliver the message by owl, for it might be intercepted, and he hadn't seen anyone on his way home from work. The next morning the whole family was dead. Frank couldn't get the image of little Susy, his niece, crying out of his head for months. She was only Neville's age, yet she had known that something very sad indeed had happened. It was for her that Frank continued to guess at the password for the locked file on Edgar's desk. It would be one last service to his friend.

Frank remembered he had been just about to join the muted conference when Alice had tugged at his wrist, pulling him down so that she could whisper in his ear. "Come on, I want to get this circus over with. We're hosting your mother tomorrow." She had been right to worry; the meal with Augusta had gone disastrously. At that moment, however, all Frank had noticed was her smell. She always smelled like sugar, a biproduct of her bubblegum habit. When Dorcas and Emmeline protested that the former's hair was not done, she dropped her husband's arm and picked up the other pigtail, talking to Lily as she twisted the blond hair.

Despite all the trouble other deaths had given Dorcas, her own death was not the hardest to swallow. True, she was the youngest, and it was in its own way the most violent. It was immediately apparent to everyone when her body showed up that she had not died gently. Her legs were broken, and her left arm was charred to the point where neither her scar nor her Mark was visible. There were several slashes on her stomach, some healed just so that whomever was torturing her could continue. She had died in pain, and there was no doubt that she had been tortured and killed by the Dark Lord himself. Yet her death was expected as soon as anyone knew she was gone. They had had their time to grieve her; her death was almost expected. There was only so much luck a person could have before it got out that, instead of feeding the Death Eaters information about the Ministry, she was feeding the Order information about the Death Eaters. Her funeral had been a closed casket and unattended by the vast majority of her old friends, the ones who now knew her true alliance.

In recalling the day of the picture, Frank tried to disconnect the people and their fates, but memory was sharper than a knife. It took the photograph itself to remind him exactly who had been there and had the distinction of being alive. Moody, Emmeline, Dodge, they all survived. But today, November 1st, 1981, he could not help but remember the Potters. Lily had been just as pregnant as Alice had been that night; their babies had been born within days of each other. It had been James, irresponsible James Potter, who had finally called the meeting to order, making sure that the group had lined up before slipping into the back with his wife. When James had trouble setting the timer, it was Lily who helped him, with an eye roll. He remembered how she had acted upset, but when James had slipped an arm around her, she still smiled and did not push him away.

Today, Frank did not just remember the day of the photograph. Her remembered James and his friends showing up to an Order meeting, acting like the teenagers they had been, until Lily, the redhead in the back who Frank had dismissed mentally only moments before as a fan girl, took the role as speaker. He remembered the ring Lily wore and the tiger lilies (that clashed nicely with her hair) she carried down the aisle. He remembered the look on James's face when his own baby news trumped by Frank and Alice's announcement. He remembered the bad things, too, among them the time James was bleeding uncontrollably because of a well-placed spell, the day Lily had learned her parents were dead, and the horrendous row they had days before they had tied the knot. He remembered their faces when they told Frank and Alice privately that Harry would not be able to make any more play-dates for the foreseeable future. That had been the last day he saw their faces.

At least, it had been, until that morning. Frank had seen, in the column to the left of the largest article, a sidebar. It was small, nothing fancy, with a nice photo that must have been from the two's Hogwarts days. Lily's hair was shorter than he remembered; Jame's hair was longer. They were both wearing red and gold scarves, and their faces were captured with the playful antagonistic looks that summed up their relationship so perfectly.

They had died last night. They were the final sacrifice that the Order made to the cause, the last cost.

Finally, Alice broke the silence, slipping her hand into the one that was not holding the picture. "We can't think about it anymore. We just have to be thankful it was not us. For Neville." Her words did not match her voice; Frank did not have to turn around to see the tears.

Frank squeezed her fingers. It almost was. He pivoted and used his thumb to wipe her eyes. She looked down and took the picture, setting it down on its face, so that the smiling faces were not visible. The rest of the morning was spent in silent harmony, until they moved to Apparate to work. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw an owl landing in the large oak that occupied their front yard. He smiled tenaciously and took Alice s hand once again.


End file.
